Edited Collection: Teaching Twenty First Century Literature

*** DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 7/30/2025 ***

Twenty-first century literature is an outlier among literary periods. As a still-unfolding period, it does not have the legitimacy of capital-H history and is, therefore, treated as an afterthought in the college curriculum, a way to supply general education credit, an attempt to “meet students where they are,” or a way to address administrators' trendy “problem areas” or research “clusters.” Moreover, in a time of austerity, when most teaching at colleges and universities is done by non-tenured and contingent faculty, studying the contemporary can feel like a luxury universities can’t afford. Among teachers ourselves, there is bafflingly little deliberation about the goals of our teaching and what we expect our students to learn when they study the literature of the present. Our field lacks unifying vocabularies, canons, and pedagogies. So, what exactly is the job of teaching 21st century literature?

Against these multiple institutional headwinds, Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature assembles avid works of teaching-focused criticism that can be read in three ways simultaneously: as practical teaching guides, engaging literary critical essays, and dispatches from their authors’ workplaces. This edited collection is a collaborative experiment in pedagogy-as-research, which seeks to articulate what we teacher-scholars do best in the literature classroom and, in so doing, offer examples for its emulation to our colleagues and mentees. By better defining what labor we teacher-scholars perform in the classroom, and what knowledge we produce with our students, this collection gets down to the business of teaching literature of, in, and for the 21st century. 

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to write 3,000-word chapters that offer an innovative pedagogical framework and/or in-class activity for teaching a single work of 21st century literature. The activity or teaching approach should be innovative, but not gimmicky. It should be informed by practice in the classroom and defined by its author’s institutional context, teaching experience, and professional position within the academy.

All abstracts will be considered, but the editor is interested in filling gaps in its current table of contents. Chapters on the following are especially welcome:

• Pre-2010 literature
• Poetry
• Asian American literature
• Indigenous literature
• Postcolonial and global anglophone literature
• LGBTQ+ authors
• Popular genres

This collection will also prioritize contributions from teacher-scholars working in:

• Contingent positions (lecturers, VAPs, postdoctoral fellows, etc.)
• Community colleges
• High schools
• Public and minority-serving institutions

All contributors are invited to explain how their institutional context and career track informs the approach to teaching.

Please send initial inquiries or 250–300-word abstracts, along with short third-person bios, to Mitch R. Murray (murram8@rpi.edu) by July 30, 2025.

The tentative deadline for complete chapter drafts will be January 31, 2026.